Instalment 1: I thought it time to write

 Vanuatu is not like I imagined. I spent the first two days in Luganville wandering around figuring out how I was going to get out of spending two years here. It has a strange history of divisions. People from a hundred or more separate cultural groups or tribes have come to live here and the small town converses in more than one hundred languages. Vanuatu is made up of 86 islands which until reasonably recently still engaged in cannibalism (the last recorded case was in the 1960s). Each small island with rough terrain and difficult access is home to several clans with differing cultures (some tribes, many now clothed Christian communities). There was once a time, when one who strayed to far from home would risk being eaten by those who lived on the other side of the island. This culture of snaking on wandering neighbours surely explains how each tribe could live in close proximity for thousands of years on a small island and never make an effort  to learn the others language. Because of this, Vanuatu is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet. The oddness has leaked into Luganville. Cities in the third world are never good at the best of times, they are made up of those rich enough to live there and those too poor to live in the rural areas. The combination of wealth and poverty has always sickened me, but in Luganville the isolation, the poverty, the lack of infrastructure and mix of cultures makes it a very interesting place indeed.

 

In Vanuatu, the hierarchy of importance ranks men at the top, whose main job it is to drink kava and chat around the meeting area, then pigs, valuable for meat and tusks, and then woman whose main job it is to cook, clean, look after the children, hunt, collect and prepare food, fish, and every other aspect of daily survival. On top of this collection of cultures is the strong missionary influence that has taken over the lives of every man, woman and child and preserved the whole country in the 1840s. The woman wear missionary style dresses decorated in bows and floral strips, praying occurs on regular intervals at every meeting. The ‘teachers’ are a large bunch of large woman, with large round afros, each wearing a missionary dress of varying floral patterns. I can see they are dismayed for my unfortunate circumstances, 28 with no children, very upsetting news in these parts- adding to that I don’t go to church- glum indeed.

 

I have discovered however that this news can be counteracted some by the news that my brother and his wife are expecting a child and all hope is not lost. Very pleasing news… I can always hear the sigh of relief. The place reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle that has been forced together but whose pieces are from a variety of other puzzles and so the picture is all wrong. The white people here follow the same pattern of oddity. There are the Peace Corps… a bunch of long haired- bearded boys who live in remote parts of the island and come into town intermittently desperate for contact with other English speakers. There are student doctors on two month study holidays in short inappropriate dress and lipstick, and the small community of expats and locals which I have been warmly welcomed into.  It’s mainly an anthropologist, some business owners, a few dive instructors as well as three other volunteers all in different development positions. After the two day shock past me by I started to feel very at home… there’s nothing like a bunch of odd people to make you feel normal.  Something about the sacrifice of living here, seeing someone who has a good job, (like a local accountant) return to a house without electricity and running water, whose children own nothing but the clothes on their back (and their clothes for church), its raw living but it makes it seem worth while.